A Tool for Negotiating Privacy Constraints in Online Social Networks (Demo Paper)

The content shared over online social networks increases rapidly. People share photos, opinions and videos of themselves. Additionally, people can share things about other people by tagging them or mentioning them. Even though users have control over what they share, they cannot manage what people have shared about them. The shared content may reveal information about the user, which the user might not wanted to share herself. This creates a privacy breach on the user’s side. In current online social networks, a common way to deal with this is for the user to complain to the social network administration and ask the content to be removed. However, by the time the content is removed (if at all), many people might have seen it already. Ideally, it would be best if such a content was not shared in the first place. In order to facilitate this, we develop a system where users are represented by software agents. Each agent is responsible for keeping track of its user’s privacy rules and communicating with other agents. Before a content is being published, relevant agents communicate among themselves in form of negotiation to reach a consensus about how a post should be published. The negotiation takes place between the initiator, the person who prepares the post, and the negotiator, the person who is included in the post. We represent the privacy domain and the privacy rules semantically by the use of ontologies. Moreover, the decision making is done using utility functions. We have developed multiple negotiation strategies, which are utility based. This demonstration will mainly show how our negotiation system works as well as show how different, realistic scenarios are handled with different negotiation strategies so that privacy violations are avoided.